Sunday, 31 August 2014

Today is the official last day of summer (sigh). And I for one can't help but reminisce about the days that have gone by in a seeming speedy mirage - where did they go??! Seems like only last week I was googling summer poems to post in the yellow nectar of a sun-warm morning, now it's autumn ones and there's a chill outside! (I'm sure you've noticed the seasonal influence to the poems here, it's a defining structure I adhere to when selecting poems as I feel poetry is a vital aid to adjusting and appreciating each season as it comes and goes, and in doing so of course, being able to see the world around us anew.)

And now it's time to say goodbye to summer, a very hard thing to do, especially when summer is the most anticipated season of the year and the most agreeable. It's always a sad time of year when autumn chimes its wind-down tone and we reluctantly and helplessly acquiesce. I think the term 'wistful brood' is just the perfect one to describe it.

The End of Summer - Shannon Georgia Schaubroeck

The summer days are fading, as they must
From endless hours to short and fleeting light.
The bird's once bright, immortal tune, now cries
A melancholy aura to the dusk.
The children fiercely climb, and dream, and race
Before their wild and unchained days depart
And yet beneath the zeal lies a half heart
For there isn't time, there's only enough space.
The sun seems low, a hazy orange sphere
Now reminiscing sweetly of the days
When endlessly before you summer lay
And as in the deep, crimson dusk you stir
Your soul joins with the birds in wistful brood
Crying for lost summer days, for childhood.

Saturday, 30 August 2014

Watching the moon rise is occasion here for Sara Teasdale to reflect on a life enchanted by beauty, or rather Beauty, that all-encompassing romantic ideal.

August Moonrise - Sara Teasdale

The sun was gone, and the moon was comingOver the blue Connecticut hills;The west was rosy, the east was flushed,And over my head the swallows rushedThis way and that, with changeful wills.I heard them twitter and watched them dartNow together and now apartLike dark petals blown from a tree;The maples stamped against the westWere black and stately and full of rest,And the hazy orange moon grew upAnd slowly changed to yellow goldWhile the hills were darkened, fold on foldTo a deeper blue than a flower could hold.Down the hill I went, and thenI forgot the ways of men,For night-scents, heady, and damp and coolWakened ecstasy in meOn the brink of a shining pool.O Beauty, out of many a cupYou have made me drunk and wildEver since I was a child,But when have I been sure as nowThat no bitterness can bendAnd no sorrow wholly bowOne who loves you to the end?And though I must give my breathAnd my laughter all to death,And my eyes through which joy came,And my heart, a wavering flame;If all must leave me and go backAlong a blind and fearful trackSo that you can make anew,Fusing with intenser fire,Something nearer your desire;If my soul must go aloneThrough a cold infinity,Or even if it vanish, too,Beauty, I have worshipped you.Let this single hour atoneFor the theft of all of me.

Wednesday, 27 August 2014

Have you ever watched a heron take flight? It's exactly as described here, clumsy and cumbersome and well, funny. (This poem is taken from the very lovely anthology: 'The Poetry of Birds', edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee.)

The Heron - Paul Farley
One of the most begrudging avian take-offs
is the heron's fucking hell, all right, all right,
I'll go the garage for your flaming fags
cranky departure, though once they're up
their flight can be extravagant. I watched
one big spender climb the thermal staircase,
a calorific waterspout of frogs
and sticklebacks, the undercarriage down
and trailing. Seen from antiquity
you gain the Icarus thing; seen from my childhood
that cursing man sets out for Superkings,
though the heron cares for neither as it struggles
into its wings then soars sunwards and throws
its huge overcoat across the earth.

Monday, 25 August 2014

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was—
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

The Everlasting Monday

Thou shalt have an everlasting
Monday and stand in the moon.

The moon's man stands in his shell,
Bent under a bundle
Of sticks. The light falls chalk and cold
Upon our bedspread.
His teeth are chattering among the leprous
Peaks and craters of those extinct volcanoes.

He also against black frost
Would pick sticks, would not rest
Until his own lit room outshone
Sunday's ghost of sun;
Now works his hell of Mondays in the moon's ball,
Fireless, seven chill seas chained to his ankle.

- See more at: http://allpoetry.com/The-Everlasting-Monday#sthash.KYTmulua.dpuf

Sunday, 24 August 2014

Stardust is
the hardest thing
to hold out for.
You must
make of yourself
a perfect place —
something still
upon which
something settles —
something like
sugar grains on
something like
metal, but with
none of the chill.
It’s hard to explain.

Saturday, 23 August 2014

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…..

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

Thursday, 21 August 2014

At 83, the great Impressionist painter Claude Monet, blind for several years (but still painting) eventually agreed to an operation to have cataracts removed and his sight restored.

In this poem, Lisel Mueller speaks in his voice, outlining the reasons why he refused the operation beforehand, mainly we see, to uphold the quality he chiefly sought in art - the pageant of moving light and air - which his deteriorating vision accentuated. The result is the image of a man who saw beauty everywhere; and the entire poem a lesson in looking, an invitation to do likewise.

Wednesday, 20 August 2014

'Like every flower, she has a little/ theory, and what she thinks/ is up.'

More sunflowers, as promised. Have you seen any yet in bloom, August's mascots?

The more I read this poem the more I like it. It's such a simple little poem, but with a lot of weight behind it too. Sunflowers always serve well as a symbol of strength, resolve, and big beaming buoyant never-give-up hope.

In this poem, Li-Young Lee, a much-loved American poet renowned for his tender lyrics, equates peaches most fittingly and beautifully, with joy. The result is gorgeous, a poem that blossoms forth from the page.

Sunday, 17 August 2014

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
Because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Saturday, 16 August 2014

Today I feel like hearing once again (I have posted it here before, maybe even twice...) Charles Bukowski's 'The Laughing Heart' because it is such a classic, the kind of poem that embeds itself in your psyche once you hear it and reverberates around there endlessly. And also, because it's Bukowski's birthday today, 16 August 1920.

Like Bukowski's other poems, it is simple yet full of wisdom, and unlike most of them, it is unabashedly optimistic. The short film of it above is pretty cool, read appropriately, by Tom Waits.

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous.
the gods wait to delight
in you.

Friday, 15 August 2014

I thought this poem on the full moon, full of love as it is, was fitting to end a week which started with a gorgeous Supermoon. The moon is many things to many people, but I think Ted Kooser has captured something special here about our relationship to it - or rather it's relationship to us. The benevolence he hints at is a balm right now.

We see only
the moon's fixed face,
as you know. It never turns aside
in pain, in anger, or disgust. It is thus
the good parent, holding the earth
at arm's length, gripping its shoulders
with cool white hands, turning
and turning it as if it were
saying goodbye, as if it were taking
one last long look. But the moon
with its homely, familiar face,
has been wishing that we fare well
every evening for millions of years,
fully knowing that we would be back
in the morning, ready to try.

Wednesday, 13 August 2014

Still the world is reeling from the death of actor Robin Williams, who took his own life, after a long battle with depression. It's so hard to understand and callously ironic too - how could someone who seemed so jovial and played so many comic roles, who brought a smile to so many people, (I am thinking particularly here of his role in Patch Adams) be so sad? It's a tragic lesson of life that sometimes the funniest people are also the saddest. Depression is no discriminator. His death hopefully, will raise more awareness and understanding of the nature of this debilitating disease.

In light of all this, I can't stop thinking of this poem ever since yesterday. It's one I encountered on the syllabus for Junior Cert English students and have since, always remembered. A simple but powerful and poignant reminder that there are cracks beneath the veneer, tears beneath the smiles of even the brightest most entertaining people. Be on the watch. Be careful. Treat everyone with compassion. Happiness and sadness are two sides of the one coin after all; a coin that life is continually tossing into the air.

Sunday, 10 August 2014

What feelings does watching a sunset evoke in us? Hard to decipher really, but here Rilke offers his explanation.

Sunset - Rainer Maria Rilke

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colorswhich it passes to a row of ancient trees.You look, and soon these two worlds both leave youone part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth.

leaving you, not really belonging to either,not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thingthat turns to a star each night and climbs -

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)your own life, timid and standing high and growing,so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

Saturday, 9 August 2014

I acknowledge my status as a stranger: Inappropriate clothes, odd habits Out of sync with wasp and wren. I admit I don'﻿t know how To sit still or move without purpose. I prefer books to moonlight, statuary to trees.

But this lawn has been leveled for looking, So I kick off my sandals and walk its cool green. Who claims we'﻿re mere muscle and fluids? My feet are the primitives here. As for the rest—ah, the air now Is a tonic of absence, bearing nothing But news of a breeze.

Friday, 8 August 2014

What if I told you the subject matter of this poem was death, a wake to be exact? Oh yes. And the theme? Why life goes on of course, seize the day, eat the ice-cream, eat, drink and be merry before the opportunity passes. The only power worth having in this life is the ability to enjoy it, hence 'the only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.' 'Let the lamp affix its beam' to life being lived. 'Let be be the finale of seem.' Stop dithering, just be.

I love the sense of cheerful fatalism the poem creates and the giddy silliness Stevens (as always) adds to such a solemn occasion. Here's to seizing the day...or the ice-cream!

Wednesday, 6 August 2014

You can expect to see a lot of sunflowers here this month - they are the official flower of August after all! Here's a lovely narrative poem to start us off.Manzano Sunflowers - Dale Harris

You missed Indian Market
And of course the sunflowers.
As usual they swept across August
At first a few, a yellow trickle along the fence line
Then more, making pools in the pasture
And splashing down into the arroyo
Then incredibly many more,
Dappling the distance,
As though a giant hand had buttered the land.

Yet with the entire prairie to expand into,
They prefer crowds of themselves
They mass along the roadside,
Lined up as though a parade were about to pass.
Here and there one stands alone,
But not for long.
Soon his kin will come
And there will be sunflower squalor
There will be sunflower squalor, a floral slum.

Once they are out,
They will not be ignored.
Stretching their skinny stalks,
They top our roofline,
Press against the window screens,
And peep in at the door.
Familiar foot paths to the out buildings are obscured,
And from the road we seem afloat,
Our cabin, an odd tin boat
In a sea of sunflower faces.

They are the most staccato of flowers.
I catch them humming snatches of polkas
And John Phillips Sousa Marches,
Bobbing in the wind to the Boogaloo,
The Boogie Woogie and the Lindy Hop.
I call their names,
Clem, Clarissa, Sarah Jane
To try and tame them.

My neighbor comes by.
She has a field full
They’re useless, she complains.
Her horses can’t eat them.
I should hope not! I exclaim,
After she’s gone.

I don’t remember if you even liked sunflowers
But you liked life
And they are all about that.
Today I wrote to your family, finally.
I expect they are occupying themselves,
With beautiful gestures
In order to get over the grief of you.
As for me, I have sunflowers.

Monday, 4 August 2014

Today the official commemoration for the centenary of WW1 will begin in Belgium. So I thought it only fitting to post this most famous of anti-war poems by a poet who fought and died in World WarI - Wilfred Owen.

Owen was only 22 when he joined the British army to serve in the War and 25 when he died. During the course of his time in the trenches and battlefields, he wrote impassioned poetry against what he saw. This poem Dulce Et Decorum was not just an anti-war poem, with its real and graphic depiction of what being on the battlefield was really like, it was also an anthem of defiance.

The title comes from the Latin phrase 'Dulce Et Decorum Pro Patria Mori' - 'Sweet and honourable it is to die for one's country' used to peddle the propaganda of enlisting. Owen debunks this myth for what it is: a lie, a farcical tragedy, a motive for mass murder. His rendition of the battlefield is the complete opposite of honour and glory. In the reality of the trenches, the soldiers are not proud marching patriots but pathetic creatures wracked by the experience, 'bent double, like old beggars under sacks.' They stagger and 'trudge' and 'fumble' along - not the expected image of soldiers on the front. The description of the poor man caught in a gas attack is particularly harrowing - 'If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood/Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs...' and is the death Owen uses to show us how there is certainly NOT anything remotely sweet and honourable about young men dying horribly in a war.

Like all the best poems too, Dulce Et Decorum is universal. It does not apply solely to the trenches of WWI, but to every war, even those today, with the essential message that war is horrible and awful and useless.

Dulce Et Decorum Est - Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Saturday, 2 August 2014

This week begins the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

Today's poem is from UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, who marked the occasion of the death of the last two remaining British veterans of the War, Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, in this poem in 2009. But much more than that, the poem is a moving testament to all the lives lost in the War. She makes reference to Wilfred Owen's infamous 'Dulce Est Decorum' and the whole poem moves as a film reel in hard-hitting format.

Last Post - Carol Ann Duffy

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud…
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home -
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce - No - Decorum- No- Pro patria mori.
You walk away.

You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too -
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert -
and light a cigarette.
There's coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.

You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.

Poetry lovers, loathers or newbies - I'd love to hear from you! Leave a comment by clicking on comments below a postand signing in with your Google ID, blog/website or Anonymous if these do not apply. Or feel free to email me at siobhanbsb@hotmail.com

The poem is not a thing we see - it is, rather, a light by which we may see - and what we see is life. ~Robert Penn Warren

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. ~Paul Engle

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. ~ Carl Sandburg

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes. ~W. Somerset Maugham

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does. ~Allen Ginsberg

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them. ~Dennis Gabor

"Always learn poems by heart," she said. "They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like the fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.'"~ Janet Fitch, 'White Oleander'

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. ~Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the development of an exclamation. ~Paul Valery

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. ~Robert Frost

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. ~Percy Byshe Shelley

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~ Leonard Cohen

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. ~Christopher Fry

Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. ~John Keats

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard. - Anne Sexton

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way? ~ Emily Dickinson

The poet is the man made to solve the riddle of the universe who brings the whole soul of man into activity. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge